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Break those backup bottlenecks: Best Practices

Identify and destroy bottlenecks with the right speeds and feeds. Do you cringe every time your office phone rings? Are you worried that the caller will be another angry user complaining that server response time is terrible because the backups you configured are still running? Even if you're not fielding loads of complaints, missing target backup windows is enough to ruin a day. Before you start throwing hardware or software at a problem, a crucial first step is identifying the potential bottlenecks. Doesn't that sound simple? Maybe, but identifying and removing bottlenecks requires a deep understanding of how data flows through a backup environment, and there exist numerous opportunities for the backup process to slow to a crawl. Your mission is to identify and eliminate bottlenecks from your environment. Consider the following company struggling with slow backup performance. Despite having a virtual tape library (a dual-headed VTL unit with aggregate performance up to 800MB/sec), multiple tape drives (25 drives with a native ...

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In the not-so-distant past, we relied on tape backups for operational recovery, disaster recovery and long-term data retention. But are full nightly backups to tape still needed now that we have new disk-based technologies like snapshots and continuous data protection?

Continuous data protection (CDP) technology is now a viable alternative to traditional backup software and storage system-based replication software. But CDP products can vary significantly, especially in the context of different storage architectures. Depending on specific environments, companies may have to evaluate very different criteria before settling on a CDP product.

Exaggerated claims, rapidly changing technology and persistent myths make navigating the deduplication landscape treacherous. We list the top five dedupe myths and provide tips to help you get a deduplication product that fits your organization's needs at a competitive price.

Hard disk drives have been around for more than 50 years, but the technology is on the cusp of big changes--SAS, a shift to the 2.5-inch form factor and a steady increase in disk drive capacity--that will affect enterprise storage for years to come.

There are a number of ways you can virtualize your storage, but because a switch-based virtualization engine works out-of-band, there's no need for server agents, making it the most scalable and highest performing of all virtualization architectures.

Virtualized servers yield many benefits, but they can also add complexity to backup operations. There are three main ways to back up a virtual server. Here's how to determine which method is best for your virtualized server environment and storage requirements.

CommVault's Galaxy solidified its position as the top enterprise backup product by finishing first for the third time in the four years we've conducted the Quality Awards. Among the midrange products, EMC Retrospect retained its crown as group champion.

Backup performance tuning is an art, but identifying infrastructure bottlenecks is more of a strict mathematical exercise once you know the important numbers. And understanding the source of existing and potential bottlenecks makes it easier to find and resolve them.

If you have a data migration project in the works, challenge your storage vendor, storage software vendor or third-party consulting firm to deliver a solution that reduces the time, risk and cost of your project.